Categories: Country

new single from rising California country artist Piper Leone a reminder to listen to her own relationship advice

Feb. 14, 2025 – Rising California country artist, singer & songwriter Piper Leone, has released new single “Joke’s On Me” today. The track is scheduled to be featured on Holler’s Best New Country Songs playlist, and debuted recently at Glide Magazine, who writes, ” “Leone sings with an unflinching confidence reminiscent of Sheryl Crow and Kacey Musgraves. … A breezy, feel-good number that’s just a little bit ’70s folk, a little bit country and a little bit pop in all the right places.”

With a lazy groove, twang-laden Telecaster leads, and subtle acoustic-guitar accents, “Joke’s on Me” offers an imagined interaction between Leone and an ex-boyfriend, where her impulses get the best of her and she gets burned once again. The hook is classic country wordplay—”the drink’s on you, but the joke’s on me,” and Leone delivers with wit, emotion, shrugging humor and a voice as golden as the hills of her home state.

“I sometimes write songs to keep me from doing something stupid,” Leone says. “When I want to do something but I know I shouldn’t, I write a song about it instead. It has a way of keeping me accountable to lessons I’ve already learned. Also, I love the turn of a phrase—something clever, something that’s like, ‘ouch!,’ but that also makes you laugh.”

Leone writes the way she sings: with unflinching honesty, steadfast perspective, and an obvious understanding that the difference between a mundane anecdote and a good story is in how you tell it. Her knack for clever wordplay and her ability to write a hook that lands like the punchline of a joke makes for songs that are as likely to make you laugh as they are to make you cry—sometimes both at the same time.

Although she is now based in L.A., Leone was raised in Northern California, splitting time between Sacramento and North Lake Tahoe, and spending her time riding horses, writing songs, and competing as a nationally ranked athlete in multiple sports. When her competitive athletic career was cut short in her freshman year of college by an injury, Leone found herself with much more time on her hands and was soon spending all of it making music. Her days and nights are now filled with songwriting, playing gigs, and riding horses.

The 23-year-old singer counts Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, Chris Stapleton, and Taylor Swift as her biggest influences, but hints of her parents’ favorite artists (Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, and Joni Mitchell, among others) find their way into her music, too. Perhaps Leone’s greatest strength is her insight and understanding of herself and others. It is this quality that makes her songs feel as much like epiphanies as they do confessions and allows her to find the simple in the complicated, the complicated in the simple, and to make sense of situations and emotions that sometimes seem to have no sense at all.

Her first single, a word-to-the-wise letter to an ex’s new girlfriend called “Next Crazy Ex” came out in early October 2024, followed by “You & USC” in November, the latter a nostalgic look back on first love, first heartbreak, and the similar roller coaster of emotions that come with being a fan of college football.